Dubious Heroes: a novel Read online

  “Firing attitude jets now”, Angie said, and I felt a little jerk as they lit. I could see the bright blue flames of the small jets, at either end of the ship, or, fore and aft, to use the proper lingo.

  “I still need a course, Doon”, she said.

  “How about away from the approaching ship?” I asked. “At least, that's where I'm most interested in going right now. And when you light the drives, give it everything we have.”

  “That's going to be about two gees, if we're lucky”, Cozi said.

  “That's what the specs say she'll do, and maybe she will, but I doubt it. She is over thirty years old”, Angie said.

  “Well, we're about to find out”, I said.

  “May I offer a… suggestion, Captain?” Angie asked.

  “Of course you can”, I said. “You're the only one of us who really knows what they're doing, and I realize you're just looking out for us. I always want your advice.”

  Whoever says AIs don't have feelings has never dealt much with AIs.

  “I'd advise against anything over one gee”, she said, “At least until Kyra is secured, and everyone is strapped into acceleration couches. Otherwise, you'll have trouble moving her, and one of you might get hurt moving around.”

  “Okay, you're right”, I said. “Give us one gee boost the moment we're in and that hatch closes.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  It was something of an odd feeling, as I suddenly realized that I was not only responsible for myself, but for these other people as well. I wasn't sure I liked the idea, but there would be plenty of time to kick it around later, provided we managed survive the next hour or two.

  We finally reached our airlock. Lola drifted inside, as did the rest of our little party, except for me. At the hull, I disconnected the reel, and was immediately yanked into the airlock via my tether. Lola was standing by the inner door, and the rest of us (and the bags) were bobbing around in the middle of the room.

  Reaching over, she smacked a big red button, and the outer door irised closed. I bobbed and floated for a moment longer, then hit the floor with a solid thud, as the main drive kicked in, no klaxons, no countdown, no warning. Well, I wasn't in much of a position to bitch, since I'd given the order, and Angie had followed it to the letter.

  I sat up amid the tangle of tethers and gear, and started unhooking myself from it all. I could hear the air hissing, as the airlock pressurized. I stood up, as the interior hatch slid open. Lola vanished out of it, and returned half a minute later, sans her spacesuit. I unhooked the tether from Kyra, and dragged her out into the passageway. Eng followed behind, shoving all the bags out of the airlock. Lola came over and starting undoing Kyra's suit.

  “You and Eng get unsuited”, she said, “Then help me get her into MedLab.”

  “No problem”, I said, and I did as she'd more or less ordered. A moment later, I popped back out of the suit room, and together, we slid Kyra out of the suit. I picked her up in my arms, and headed for the MedLab. At one gee, she was not light. I placed her on the exam bed, and loosely strapped her down. Sticking my head out of the door, I yelled back at Eng.

  “Grab one of those duffels with weapons and meet me on the Bridge”, I said.

  “On my way”, he said, as he trotted by me, toward the core.

  I looked back in the MedLab, where Lola was positioning the monitoring gear around Kyra.

  “You know how to work this stuff?” I asked.

  “Some of it”, she said. “It's not that complicated. This stuff isn't thirty years old, either. Someone updated your equipment. It seems to be pretty much idiot-proof.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “It's been a rough day”, she said, with a brief, sad smile, “But I'll make it. I'll take care of Kyra. You need to be on the Bridge.”

  “If you need help-”

  “Captain”, Angie said.

  “Go ahead, Angie.”

  “Does this person named Eng have access to the Bridge?”

  “He does”, I said. “I thought you heard me tell him to go there.”

  “Sorry”, she said. “I wasn't listening in at that moment.”

  “My mistake”, I said. “I just assumed you always do. Let him in, and I'll be up there myself in a couple of minutes.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  I turned back to Lola. Kyra's vital signs were now showing up on one of the monitors.

  “How's she doing?” I asked.

  “She seems to be stable”, Lola said. “At least, as best as I can tell. The Med monitor isn’t freaking out, so that’s good. I think she needs blood, but I don't even know how to get her type, so we could see if any of us could be a donor.” She tapped at one of the vidscreens. “Your systems are up, so maybe the info is in here. I’ll work on it.”

  “Like I was about to say, call me if you need anything.”

  “Doon”, she said, as I headed out the door. I paused, and looked back.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don't let these guys board us, if you can help it. They won't leave any survivors, this time.”

  I didn't know what to say to that, so I headed for the Bridge.

  I entered the Bridge to find both Cozi and Eng strapped into stations. The Captain's console was empty, so I plopped into my seat and buckled myself in. The chair spun and slid me up to the console.

  “ETA six minutes”, Angie said, “But they're no longer on a direct intercept, thanks to our movement. It looks like they're decelerating, and will pass by us to our port side. They'll probably take the opportunity to strafe us as they pass.”

  “Great”, I said. “I don't suppose we could lob something out in front of them as they come by?”

  “Negative”, she said. “The cargo bays are all empty. Max thrust in three, two, one… firing.” The force of the drives pushed me firmly into the padded seat. I was awfully glad she hadn't done that while we were in the airlock.

  “Damn”, Cozi said, breathless. “That's gotta be more than two gees.”

  “Main drives are at one hundred ten percent”, Angie said. “We're at two point six gees acceleration.”

  “Someone must have tweaked those drives”, Cozi said.

  “Or fudged the specs”, Eng said. “They always fudge the specs.”

  I pushed a button on my armrest, and the chair spun so I could see him. The view on the tri-d of the closing ship was kind of alarming, anyway.

  “Can we outrun them now?” I asked.

  “Negative”, Angie said. “Their speed is still greater than ours, and they're no longer slowing. They'll pass and cross over in front of us in a little less than five minutes. They may still try to come around, once they figure out what we're doing.”

  “They'll probably try to knock out our engines on the pass by”, Eng said. “Then we'll be at their mercy.”

  “What did you do on the Cooper?” I asked.

  “First Officer”, he said. “Lola was cargo master, and as you probably already know, Kyra was security.”

  “Our external vid cameras are all out”, Angie said. “Probably hit with a laser, but I have no way to tell.”

  “Jesus, don't we get any warning?” I asked.

  “As I said before”, she explained, “We just don't have the sensors. Compared to the Ming Shu we're flying blind. We can't even protect them- all the cameras and sensors are fixed.”

  “Damn poor design, if you ask me”, I said.

  “The designers probably never thought anyone would be shooting at them”, Cozi said.

  “Yeah, well, times have changed”, I said.

  “No shit”, Cozi added.

  “Who are these guys?” I asked Eng.

  “As far as I know, just raiders of some sort. They must have known our route in advance, and were lying in wait inside that band of asteroids to ambush us.”

  “They didn't hail you, maybe tell you what they wanted?”

  “Nope, they just showed up and opened fire on us”, Eng said.

  “How'd they
get your itinerary?” Cozi asked. “I wouldn't think smugglers would post notices of it.”

  “What makes you think we were smuggling?” Eng said. “The Cooper is a respected cargo hauler, and we were on a legit run.”

  “You couldn't get away from them?” I asked.

  “Not enough speed, as you're seeing right now. Then they knocked out our engines. They came alongside, grappled and boarded us. There was a firefight, and the captain, two guys from engineering, and the med officer were all killed. We retreated to the passenger level of the Habitat, and there, Kyra held them off. She was shot pretty badly, and so was Lola. I hurt my leg falling down the core, leaving the Bridge. Eventually they just left, but not until they knocked out everything on the Bridge. They also cleaned out two cargo holds. They knew exactly what they were after.”

  “Which was?” I asked.

  “Explosives, he said. “Mining charges, eight tons of the stuff, headed for Pluto.”

  “Our engines are overheating”, Angie said. “That's consistent with them being fired on by a gamma ray cannon.”

  “How much of that can we take?” I asked.

  “Quite a lot, actually”, Angie said. “They're only hitting them because they can't get a fix on anything more sensitive, but that will change soon.”

  “How soon?” I asked.

  “About now”, she said. “Fuel cell one is overheating.”

  “Okay, how long do-”

  The entire ship shook.

  “Fuel cell one has exploded”, Angie said. An alarm sounded. “Explosive decompression in the Engineering Module. The fuel cells are all mounted beneath it.”

  “I'm getting some weird readings from the reactor”, Cozi said. “I think it's been damaged.”

  A new alarm sounded.

  “What's that alarm?” I asked.

  “Collision warning”, Angie said. “The hostile ship has crossed our path, but it looks like they left a present for us. Debris field ahead. Collision in fifteen seconds.”

  “Oh shit”, Cozi said. “The reactor is shutting down. Eighty percent and dropping fast.”

  “I don't think it's gonna get a chance to shut down”, I said. “Angie, can the debris be avoided?”

  “Negative”, she said. “There isn't time.” Another, different siren started whooping. I hadn't heard it before, either.

  “Transit engaged”, Angie said.

  I heard someone, I'm not sure who, say “Transit?”, and then I was standing on top of a mountain, which was interesting, as I'd never been on one before. Puffy white clouds drifted by overhead, looking as though they'd been painted on a deep blue canvas. A brisk wind tugged at my clothes, sharply cold, and faintly sweet-smelling. I shivered, and looked down. I was standing in white stuff. What was it called? Snow. I was standing in snow. I looked around, and saw there were other mountains, also cloaked in snow, surrounding me, as far as I could see. It was beautiful.

  And then there was darkness.

  Chapter 13

  Now, for the physics part of the story. Yes, it’s boring as hell, but you need to know a little bit. If you’re like me, you avoided (or slept through) physics classes in school; I didn’t understand it until someone (besides the professor) explained it to me in plain English. I had an AI explain it to me, and I’ll try to do the same for you.

  You’re welcome. Okay, here we go.

  The universe is full of stuff. I actually did learn this in college, proving that my time there wasn’t a complete waste, contrary to the opinions of my professors. Of course, stuff is just a fancy word for matter, or maybe I have that backwards. Matter itself doesn’t weigh anything, but it does have mass. You act upon mass with gravity, and then the matter has weight.

  So, where does the gravity come from? Even the tiniest bits of matter have a little gravity, just not enough to effect anything around them (in a way we can see). But if you stick enough little pieces of matter together, the gravity adds up, which attracts even more bits of matter. Some things are pulled right into the mix, and others just sort of hang around, in orbit around the clump of matter. The further you get away from the gravity, the less of it there is, until you’re eventually weightless. But you’ll still have mass. Yes, I know, it’s weird.

  Billions of years ago, back when the universe began, lots of little bits of stuff all clumped together. No one knows for sure why it started clumping or even how it started; they’re still arguing about that. Eventually, the clumps grew large enough to have a significant amount of gravity, which really sped up the whole clumping process. After a time, the weight of the clumps of matter would get to be so large that they’d start to heat up, and then ignite. There are billions of these big clumps still burning. They’re called stars. Their gravity interacted with other large things, which had their own gravity, and after a time, organized themselves into small things like solar systems, then bigger things, called galaxies and finally, some seriously big things formed, called galactic clusters, made up of many, many galaxies.

  And gravity is what holds the whole shebang together.

  Way back in the twenty-first century, someone figured out that if you have this much mass, then you ought to have that much gravity. On smaller scales, like with planets and solar systems, the math agreed with what they could see, and everyone was happy. But then they started looking at galaxies. By gauging the brightness of a galaxy they would have a fair estimate of how many stars were in it, and from that, they could estimate the mass of all those stars, which in turn would tell them how much gravity there ought to be.

  The problem was, in galaxy after galaxy, there just didn’t seem to be enough stuff to account for all the gravity they were seeing. The more gravity there is, the further out a clump of matter can hang on to other things (like planets), and the faster they can orbit around, without flying off into space. Based on the math that had worked so well before, there had to be a lot more gravity around than there was mass to account for it. How much is a lot? Based upon the stuff we could see, and the amount of gravity it was taking to make things behave the way they were in fact behaving, we humans were only seeing about seven percent of the matter in our universe. That left a whopping ninety-three percent of the matter in the universe, well… missing.

  This tended to give me a headache back in my physics class, although in all fairness, that might have just been a chronic hangover. Regardless, it also tended to bother another group of people, specifically cosmologists and particle physicists. In fact, it bothered them a lot. As with many people too geeky to have a sex life, they’d devoted their lives to studying the universe, and were now finding out they couldn’t even see most of it.

  Around the same time, an equally geeky group of mathematicians was fiddling around with something they called string theory, the gist of which was that there weren’t just the four dimensions we knew about, but at least six or seven, and maybe more. A lot of them liked the number ten, and settled on that as the number, but in actuality, they weren’t really certain. As it turned out, (at least) six of the dimensions were just really, really small, at least from our perspective. Depending on how string was arranged, it was possible that one of these other dimensions might even hold entire, infinite universes, as our own did. They called those other dimensions membranes, or just branes, for short.

  Theory said that you could take a particle of something, and by manipulating (or rotating) the string (i.e., its structure), you could find, and even access, entirely new branes. And these places didn’t necessarily have to have the same laws of physics as our own.

  During this time, the cosmologists and particle physicists hadn’t just thrown up their hands in defeat. They labeled all the stuff they couldn’t see dark matter, since if it was light, then they’d have been able to see it. Some of that dark matter was ordinary, easily explained things, like planets, which don’t put out any light since they aren’t burning (unless they’re having a really bad day), and other, odder things, like black holes, which have so much gravity that
even light can’t escape from them. But, even adding their estimate of these dark things to what they could see, they were still short by about ninety-percent of the mass they needed for it all to make sense.

  They called the normal stuff, the ten percent they could account for, baryonic matter. Everything else they called non-baryonic matter. It always seemed to me a bit presumptuous that they’d call the little bit of the universe we could see “normal”, which could make the rest of it abnormal. But, being that we humans are ourselves baryonic matter, I guess their bias is understandable. Try that as a pickup line in a bar, and you’ll see what scientists are up against. Be prepared to go home alone. Regardless, non-baryonic was just a label for something they had no clue as to what was, or where it might even be.

  What seems obvious to us now actually took the better part of twenty years to transpire. It might have happened sooner, had the physicists, cosmologists, and string theorists all been frequenting the same bars and cocktail parties, but they weren’t. Nonetheless, they eventually did get together, and realized they were looking at the same thing, just from different perspectives. After the usual amount of scientific infighting, most of them agreed that all that gravity they could see had to be bleeding over from matter located in another brane which they couldn’t see.

  They persisted in calling it “dark matter”, even though, over in that other universe (or universes), it might be perfectly “normal” light matter, like stars and stuff. Still, the revelation made for a lot of very happy scientists and mathematicians, as things like quantum mechanics, gravity, and general relativity not only made sense, but all meshed together quite nicely. There were many parties and celebrations, until some spoilsport had to go and say “prove it.” Scientists, being the type of people who won’t believe much of anything until it’s been proven, spent the next few decades doing just that.

  They found that by dinking around with certain types of particles at the string level, these particles tended to go away. While this was interesting (and pretty cool), making particles (and even bigger things) disappear wasn’t all that fulfilling. The problem was, things went away, but didn’t come back. They knew where the stuff was going; other branes, or dimensions, but they had an inkling that if the physics of a brane were different enough, then their gadgets they were sending might not work when they got there, thus confounding their pursuit of that Holy Grail of actually getting something to come back.